Designing for Financial Analytics

April 2026

Analysts and data scientists at financial institutions need to quickly and easily process millions of datapoints into actionable results; SAS Institute provides a suite of analytical tools to help distill unstructured data into usable points of interest.

I design for several solutions that act as distinct stages of the financial data life cycle. I have been the sole designer for two solutions: tasked with bringing them from concept, to prototype, to sellable product.

The following case study outlines the development of our comprehensive one-stop-shop for financial data management: Integrated Balance Sheet Management.

Use Case

The user is a financial risk analyst tasked with managing their institution's assets and liabilities. This consists of processing their organization's massive balance sheets into a clear financial picture that they can reference to make informed decisions.

Our users require a common landing page that aggregates their data from interconnected risk solutions in the SAS suite. This product, Integrated Balance Sheet Management, also needs to direct the user to the appropriate solution for deeper analysis.

Conceptualization

Integrated Balance Sheet Management started from pure concept, based on customer feedback collected by product managers. Regularly workshopping with a small team of PMs and company thought leaders, I gained a deep understanding of the business requirement and began to see a design challenge before me.

Over rounds of discussions, I narrowed down on a conceptual direction for the design. In tandem, the PM team used my conceptual mockups to improve their requirement writings. We both maintained forward momentum by improving from one another.

Iterative Design

My initial decision-making covered navigation and product positioning: deciding to leverage a new tile component to serve as the entry points for shortcuts to other products, and determining where in the suite hierarchy IBSM could be most accessible. This resulted in a landing-page style experience with a grid of visual tiles that provided the user more context than just the shortcut name.

I improved from feedback sessions, but also pushed back on PM feedback when appropriate. Suggestions such as adding more visual elements could compromise the product's lightweight scope, so I used a segmented approach to split up large swaths of data categories into small pages with appropriate graphs and KPIs.

Throughout the design process, I led by setting sprint cadences, feedback sessions, and drove discussions. The product requirements also spun off of the design iterations and improved based on them. With this strategy, we could iterate on a design that was both ambitious and low-cost.

While initially operating in a blue-sky ideation environment, I needed to demonstrate restraint due to the limitation of the component library we were working with. I leveraged existing design conventions and UIs from other products to minimize the duplication of effort, new tickets made, and dev overhead.

Results

The final result was a comprehensive, fully workable Figma prototype that the PM team and I could demo to division leadership. Product requirements were then further refined as the project was developed and I consulted with the dev team on UX & accessibility best practices. Adding Integrated Balance Sheet Management to the SAS risk product suite means that formerly disconnected data is now aggregated in a common place for users to easily view and manage.

Andrew Thornton